The following abbreviations are herewith defined, at least some of which are referred to within the following description about at least the prior art and/or the present invention.    CDN Content Delivery Network    GPS Global Positioning Satellite    HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol    IP Internet Protocol    MPEG Moving Picture Experts Group    SCTE35 Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers    RTMP Real Time Messaging Protocol    RTSP Real Time Streaming Protocol    UDP User Datagram Protocol    VOD Video-On-Demand    XML Extensible Markup Language
Current broadcast technology uses advertising markers (e.g., SCTE 35s) to designate where advertisements should go in a broadcast stream or even a VOD stream. The advertising markers are basically “splice” points which indicate where an advertisement might go, not what sort of advertisement should be played there. Video providers have increasingly been experimenting with and using streaming servers such as “http adaptive streaming servers” which allows them to provide a content stream to consumers using a wide range of devices (e.g., personal computer, a mobile phone, a tablet, or HTTP capable television) while maximizing bandwidth efficiency. Although the traditional advertising markers (e.g., SCTE 35s) are embedded in the mpeg transport streams which are provided to the streaming server they are virtually invisible to the traditional streaming server's segmenting unit. This lack of compatibility with traditional advertising markers (e.g., SCTE 35s) requires companies to perform costly upgrades to their streaming servers, or buy new technologies to add advertising into the http stream or http adaptive streams. Accordingly, there has been and is a need to address this shortcoming and other shortcomings associated with the traditional streaming servers. This need and other needs are satisfied by the present invention.